Astrophotography - Milky Way

This section is dedicated to wide-field views of the Milky Way galaxy and
for images of objects inside our galaxy that don't fit anywhere else.
The Milky Way galaxy is the galaxy we live in. It is a platter
shaped group of around around 400 billion
stars - our sun being one of them. Nearly everything you can
view in the sky is part of our own galaxy, though we estimate that there are
over 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Because the Milky Way
is relatively flat shaped, the majority of the stars within the galaxy can
be viewed in a band that goes across the sky. You may have seen this cloud
looking, slightly immuminated, 'milky' band on a clear night.

Milky Way 2007 Panorama - 8/8/2007

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For my first real astrophotography session of the summer (yes, I know it's already August) I decided to
capture a wide field image of the Milky Way. While I'm
happy with this image, I think it could have been much better. The framing was a bit difficult due to a
very limiting camera mount to my telescope (I just ripped the head off a mini-tripod) so I wasn't able to frame
each shot very well. The result is much more narrow than I wanted and it was a major pain to get the mosaic
stitched together.

Milky Way Panorama

Taken from a VERY dark site while spending a night helping out at girl's camp,
this picture shows much nebulosity and structure of the Milky Way galaxy. The
LARGE dark area is a pine tree. The dark bands in the Milky Way are dark
nebula - areas of dust and debris that block the glow of the stars behind.

This image is
a composite of two images. Each one is 3X3 minutes registered
and stacked in Iris and processed in Photoshop. Taken with an unmodified
Nikon D70 on an AS-GT mount. Nikkor AS-S DX 18-70mm lens at 18mm. ISO 800
and f/4. The framing was kinda bad and after stitching the two images
together, I decided on the somewhat awkward angle so as to not lose the bright
nebulous M20 region at the bottom right.

Cygnus Milky Way

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A view of the Cygnus and Cephus region of the Milky Way. You can begin
to see nebulocity (glowing colors) in the images. Nebulas are huge clouds
of gaseous (mostly Hydrogen Alpha and Beta) materials mixed in with interstellar
dust. Nebulas are classified as planetary nebulas, supernova remnants, and
diffuse nebulas, including reflecting, emission, and dark nebulas. Also in the
photo are several star clusters, groups of stars held together by mutual gravitational
forces. Star clusters can be comprised of anywhere from 2 to several million
stars.